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The greatest Royal/Met

A while ago I wrote a little Python code that used career data from Baseball-Reference Play Index (the best $36/year a number-loving baseball fan can spend) to answer the question: given a pair of teams, which player contributed the most to both teams? My metric for this is

(WAR for team 1 * WAR for team 2)

in order to privilege players who balanced their contributions to both teams.

So who was the greatest Royal/Met? In retrospect, this should have been obvious. How many of the top 5 can you guess?

Carlos Beltran (777.1)

Bret Saberhagen (473.3)

David Cone (271.1)

Kevin Appier (165.6)

Kevin McReynolds (29.8)

Rick Reed (24.8)

Gregg Jefferies (13.4)

According to b-ref, there are actually only 24 players in major league history who have played for both the Royals and the Mets. If anybody can name 5 not on this list I’ll be truly impressed.

[…] question. Which player in baseball history was the best combined Cub/Indian? My methodology, as it was last year, is to draw the top 200 position players and pitchers from each team by Wins Above Replacement, […]